Calculating the odds of life

[Xamonas Chegwé]

GenesForLife talks a lot of sense for somebody that is just trying to sneak into Britain to become a drain on our welfare system.

[GenesForLife]

The paper is here, by the way http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/f ... type=HWCIT

[Tero]

There is no flipping coins. The math may get complicated as each molecule was an experiment of its own. There are a lot of parallel experiments.

[GenesForLife]

And Tero hits the nail on its head, the odds of something happening, my friends, increases with the frequency the improbable event is carried out/occurs,the act of contriving to not consider this is called committing the the Serial Trials Fallacy.

[GenesForLife]

I'm currently working on illustrating the differences in the various functional insulin proteins found all round the biosphere.

[GenesForLife]

Will try and prepare a report tomorrow, I need to copy sequences into Notepad batch by batch, then collate and prepare images of the alignment showing amino acid variability.

[MrFungus420]

Looks like the classic "argument from really big numbers that I pulled out of my ass".

[mistermack]

I agree with GenesForLife, mostly. Until you know the EXACT mechanism, the abundance of the vital constituents, the required conditions of temperature, sunlight etc, and the common conditions on earth when it's supposed to have happened, it's impossible to make any kind of valid calculation at all.

And if the required conditions WERE common on earth, then the "experiment" would be being performed by chance trillions of times per hour, all with slightly different parameters, at the time.

I wouldn't agree with the chance being 1 though, because life COULD have been seeded by a particle from space, from a previous planet that evolved life, was destroyed, and life was deep frozen till that particle reached Earth. So it's not absolutely certain that life evolved from sterile seas here on Earth.

Amino acids have been found in the samples taken from a comet, so it's likely that there were plenty of these were floating around in the first seas.
Whether more complicated organic substances were seeded from space isn't known.
.

[GenesForLife]

Well, I thought I was talking about the odds of life forming and not just odds of life forming on earth...

[mistermack]

Well, I thought I was talking about the odds of life forming and not just odds of life forming on earth...

Yeh, that thought just occurred to me too. So you have to work from the date of the first planets, to give the available time.
Of course, life COULD have evolved independently BILLIONS of times, so we can only say "at least" 1.
.

[Coito ergo sum]

Determining the odds of life is extremely difficult. Moreover, we have no definition for the word impossible. At what point do odds become so large that we must confess that they are impossible?

When the odds are zero. Like, what are the odds of a human being growing to 1,000,000 astronomical units in height. Zero. Impossible.

Your discussion of the odds of the impossible amounts to something like this:

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

Doug Adams beat you to it.

[MrFungus420]

[spinoza99]

Genes,

you are not an objective scientist because you've clearly expressed an extreme repugnance for any ideas which imply intelligent design. you will always bend the results of your findings to please you. you will ignore evidence that refutes your cherished beliefs, and you will focus on evidence that confirms it. an ethical scientist has no emotional interest in any one theory, the only thing that matters is the truth and he accepts whatever that truth is without emotion. you clearly have an emotional investment in atheism as demonstrated by your numerous insults. you wouldn't use insults in a phd thesis, so why do you use them now?

You have pointed to flaws in my calculation of the odds without you yourself offering odds based on your own calculations. I already demonstrated that even if we assume that all life came from a creature which was half as complex Mycoplasma Mycoides, the odds would still be one in 900 googols. There has be to some threshold in which life is not possible with a particular DNA sequence. You cannot sequence DNA anyway you like and expect it to replicate. A true, good and virtuous atheist does not believe in anything without evidence, so believing that life came from a being of one fifth the complexity of the Mycoplasma Mycoides would be to commit the cardinal sin of atheism: to believe in something for which there is no evidence. Humans share 90% of their DNA with a tree. All advanced life has 90% of the DNA in common. Therefore it is rational that 90% of the DNA found in the Mycoplasma Mycoides must be sequenced in an exact way, but even if we assume that only 25% of it need be sequenced in an exact way then the odds are still one in 450 googols that it could be sequences at random.

I gave the atheists an enormous benefit of the doubt in assuming that the number of events at our disposal is roughly a max of 2 googols, in reality it is probably closer to .3 googols, if not .1 googols. I assumed that the max number of events was equal to the number of atoms in the universe linking with one another each billionth of a second that has existed in our universe's history, moreover i assumed that there are as many Universes in existence as there are atoms in the Universe.

In reality, to be honest we would have to divide the number of nitrogen atoms in our universe by however many it takes to make one DNA base pair and it's about 20 or so, then we have to restrict the time to the time after the first galaxies arose.

And we cannot stop there. If we wanted we could try to calculate the odds of the Cambrian Explosion, an extraordinarily unlikely event probably equal to one in a million googols.

You also conveniently ignored the question: how does randomness select the correct properties from an infinite set of properties. In our Universe, F = MA,
all three of those letters are properties. Randomness has no ability to make properties work in coordination with each other. Randomness can only select the right answer from a finite list some of the time, randomness cannot do what humans do every day: the amount of utterances at a human's disposal is infinite, and yet we utter grammatically correct utterances about 99% of the time. If you randomness is instructed to produce from an infinite list a correct formulation such as F = MA it will never accomplish the task. If the odds that will fail are one in an infinity, then you will always fail.

Another poster offered the possibility that there are infinite universes. This is committing the cardinal sin of atheism which is to believe in something for which there is no evidence.

Chemical processes are random in that you cannot predict, in a mixture of reagents, which particular reagent molecules will react and which won't, but the process of bonding is NOT.

True, the process of bonding is not random. Bonding is a property. Randomness cannot choose the correct properties such that several properties will coordinate to form something like life. Even if that were true, that randomness could select properties, randomness cannot sequence material into a correct sequence of which the odds are one in 100 googols if only a half of a googol of events is at its disposal.

[Thinking Aloud]

I gave the atheists an enormous benefit of the doubt in assuming that the number of events at our disposal is roughly a max of 2 googols

It was very generous of you.

[RuleBritannia]

The odds after the event aren't relevent.